Warning Cars Rolling Uphill Ahead

In reply to a query, the New Scientist received a delightful assortment of replies related to "magnetic vortices" and other places where gravity seems to be reversed. At such places, car drivers can stop, put the car in neutral, release the brakes, and the car will seem to roll uphill. Some of the spots mentioned were:

On route A719, in Ayrshire, there are "special warning signs because of the likelihood of meeeting cars coasting uphill backwards, as baffled drivers are confused by their senses."

Near Neepawa, Manitoba, one finds a road named Magnetic Hill.

Northern Portugal. Here, bikers have to pedal hard to go downhill !

Lake Wales, Florida, is the location of Spook Hill, described in SF#73 and SF#79, and, of course, our book Science Frontiers (To order see here.

Other locales: near Hanging Rock, Australia; the island of Cheju Do, off the South Korean coast.

At some of these spots, surveying instruments have been brought in, and without exception the reversal of gravity has been shown to be illusory. Sorry folks, there are no magnetic vortices!

"A sourcebook of unexplained phenomena is therefore a valuable addition to a collection of scientific literature. William R. Corliss has provided this in the past with his source books of scientific anomalies in several subjects, and now he has provided it for astronomy. He has done an excellent job of collecting and editing a large amount of material, taken in part from scientific journals and in part from scientific reporting in the popular or semi-scientific press." -- "The Mysterious Universe: A Handbook of Astronomical Anomalies", reviwed by Thomas Gold, Cornell University, in Icarus, vol.41, 1980

"An interesting, systematic presentation of unusual weather [..] This book is recommended for a general audience" --"Corliss, William R., Tornados, Dark Days, Anomalous Precipitation, and Related Weather Phenomena, Sourcebook Project, 1983.", revieweed in Choice, September 1983

"Before opening the book, I set certain standards that a volume which treads into dangerous grounds grounds like this must meet. The author scrupulously met, or even exceeded those standards. Each phenomenon is exhaustively documented, with references to scientific journals [..] and extensive quotations" -- "Book Review: The moon and planets: a catalog of astronomical anomalies", The Sourcebook Project, 1985., Corliss, W. R., Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, Vol. 81, no. 1 (1987), p. 24., 02/1987